I left work this morning with a song in my heart and joy in my step, last night was my last shift on the FRU car.

No longer will I be standing around with my hands in my pockets for 45 minutes while a six month old child lays in front of me with possible meningitis.  No more will I be told by Control to go and drive around and look busy when there is something good on telly, and no longer will my only conversation with people consist mainly of “where does it hurt?” for twelve hours straight.

I have four days off, and then from Friday I’m back to working on a ‘truck’, a nice big person carrying medical-taxi truck.

Lovely!

The Driving Instructor (frequent commenter and jolly good read) asked if I would miss the FRU.  Does this answer your question?

I was hoping that this last shift would fly by in an exciting cascade of trauma, life-saving and dramatic illness.

*ahem*

It was actually a fairly quiet night, I did seven jobs, four of them being people with coughs (one cough having lasted three weeks before he decided to call an ambulance at 5am in the morning), my last call was to an elderly gentleman with emphysema (and a cough) who actually needed hospital treatment.

However – my first two calls were to drunks.

The first call was a young man, who after having an argument with his family drank a bottle of wine and pretended to be unconscious.  We loaded him into the ambulance, and as I had a ‘funny feeling’ about the job I traveled in the ambulance with the patient and the ambulance crew.  During the transport it seemed that he took a dislike to me and opened his eyes just enough to plant a heavy slap to the inside of my leg.

I may have swore at him.

My second job was a ‘classic’ – ‘Male collapsed in street, unknown life status – caller refusing to go near patient or answer any questions’.  So I rushed round there and found two female police officers standing over a drunk male who was asleep in the street.  I did all my normal checks to makes sure that he was only drunk (as opposed to being drunk and in a diabetic coma, drunk and has had a stroke, or drunk and has been stabbed).  Everything pointed to him being just drunk.

We woke him up and were prepared to send him on his way.  He stood up – took one look at me, and smacked me in the mouth.

I ‘assisted’ him onto the floor.  The police officers and I then stopped him from injuring himself by sitting on him in a professional manner.

The police have been trained in restraint – they are all careful because they don’t want people dying of positional asphyxia.  I haven’t been trained in restraint (well not in the ambulance service) but I’m guessing that someone isn’t going to die because I’m kneeling over their arm while holding their wrist.

So we carefully restrained him (for around twenty five minutes), while he explained how he was either going to kick my head in, or sue me.  By then the police had tracked down a, now mortified, relative who came and took him away.

No damage done to me, although I would think that as he wakes up this morning he’ll have a number of bruises.  I hopped in my car, told Control that I had been assaulted twice in two jobs, so I asked if I could head back to station for a calming cup of tea – which they let me.  They also made sure that I was alright and didn’t need any other help.

As a question to any police officers reading this.  The man was drunk and had (in a minor fashion) assaulted me, and attempted to assault two police officers, yet there was a real reluctance to arrest him.  I’m wondering if this is because there would be little or no chance of there being a prosecution?  Or is there some other reason?  I’m not moaning, just curious…

When my mother found out about my being assaulted, did she ask how I was?  Did she ask if I had been hurt, or damaged?

No. 

Her comment was “At least you’ll have something interesting to blog about”.

Bloody lovely that is…